Committee on Standards

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Tuesday 16th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

I normally have to say that thing—there are all these things we have to say—“It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope)”. I am actually going to defend his position, and critique what he has said. My first critique is that I found the tone in which he spoke to one of his colleagues to be slightly unacceptable as a woman in these proceedings. However, as a woman in these proceedings, I have had call to find some of his tone problematic in the past, so nothing new there.

I love to turn up to these debates and have it out once again, but where I am going to defend the hon. Gentleman is that he is standing in this Chamber defending a position and being barracked for that position—I can understand why; I get it: people want this to go away and I can see why people in this House would want that—when it was the Government’s position 13 days ago. So it is slightly unusual, notwithstanding the fact that he would not take an intervention from the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) while saying that he liked debate. To be fair, it would never have been his position. It is all well and good barracking him and saying we should not be talking about it, but this was the Government’s position just weeks ago, and I think that is important to remember.

I want to go over a couple of things. The idea of natural justice seems to be incredibly in the eye of the beholder. As somebody who has worked in the justice sector for nearly two decades now, I find it something that is never ever said about victims. Victims are never asking for natural justice, one notes. Natural justice is terminology that always gets pulled out when people do not like the result of something that has happened, I find.

I feel that what happened in this case absolutely was natural justice. The right hon. Gentleman—sorry, Owen Paterson—was entitled all the way through to defend his case. The Leader of the House spoke earlier about his mind being clouded by the tragedy that had occurred. I have some sympathy for that, except that is not a mitigation ever offered to any of my constituents in immigration tribunals or welfare tribunals. Dreadful things that have happened to them would never be taken into account. It is difficult when the Government’s policy is to mitigate against only some people and to cloud their minds against only some people.

In this case, all the way through the Member was entitled to defend himself, and defend himself he did, considerably better than lots of Members in this House who do not have £100,000 contracts would have been able to do. Let’s not even get started on access to justice outside this House—welcome to almost every family court in the land, where people are defending themselves—but he was able to access legal representation all the way through. That is undeniable, and it was not just legal access. Let’s face it, Owen Paterson will have had considerably better access to law, silks and fancier lawyers than most people in this House, so let us not pretend that he was completely and utterly blindsided by this process and that it was not handled fairly, because it absolutely was.

I have some sympathy with the argument about appeals, and I am more than happy to take part in any debate about how that appeal system might work. My personal view is that the system used by the sexual harassment process that we set up, with judges sitting over it, is one that I would not mind seeing in place, although I have to say that people should be wary: the judges are very robust, they are very detailed and they cross-examine the evidence. In those cases, I have never once seen it come down on the side of the Member. In fact, there are former Members of the House who are no longer sitting here because of what the appeal said. Unfortunately, following the appeal in one of the cases, the Member still sits in here, regardless of the loss of members of staff from this place—that is the hon. Member for Delyn (Rob Roberts).

I want to say a tiny thing for the public about transparency and how these things work. I feel a little bit for the right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom). The way that these things work in this House usually is that the Government find a Back Bencher who has credibility and make her take a measure through—it is often a “her”—on behalf of the Executive, and that is what happened last time. She has been totally sold down the river and her credibility, which was good on these issues, has unfortunately been damaged by the Executive.